Do thoughts of laundry interrupt you while you’re at work? Work thoughts when you’re with the kids? Kid worries when you’re doing the shopping?
If you find yourself constantly interrupted by one part of your day when you’re in the middle of another, if you have multiple to-do lists running in your head all day (work list, kids list, shabbas list…) then block scheduling would suit you well.
This is something I discovered last Elul and I’d been using it with pretty satisfying results until I forgot about it a few weeks ago… I’m now attempting to reinstitute it!
There are reams of articles written about block scheduling but I’m going to encapsulate it in a sentence:
Separate your day into its predictable, natural separate sections and, in each section, write down which jobs should be done during that time block.
That becomes your reusable, daily block schedule.
how it works
The thing is, we all have some degree of predictability to our days. Even though the jobs change, we all have a ‘wake up’ block and a ‘bedtime’ block. We might have ‘mealtime’ blocks or ‘work’ blocks or ‘baby naptime’ blocks or ‘school run’ blocks that define our day in some way.
Mine looks like this:
You can see this is not rocket science, right? I already knew this, so what’s new about writing it down in pretty colours?
What’s new is that seeing it in front of you empowers you to select what part of the day to do what tasks in. For example, it was revolutionary for me to realise that when I stop work, I actually do have an opportunity to do things for myself! Or to realise that evenings, by the time my kids are in bed, are just not very long, so I should stop thinking, “I’ll do it this evening” because evenings are not 4 hours long like they once were!
But this is only stage one. Stage 2 is to write the recurring things we need to do in those days. In general terms. I’m not talking, like, buy tomatoes and book a dentist appointment. More like, which part of the day is for errands? When’s the best time for necessary housework? Have you got a slot for doing homework with little Shmuli? Etc.
Here’s what it might look like:
This is a slightly simplified version of what my real day looks like. You can see that I’ve put a ‘school run’ block at 3:15. In actual fact, some days I do school run in the morning, not the afternoon, and in my own version I’ve put options depending on the day of the week. I guess I ought to do a totally different one for a Friday, especially a winter Friday, since that’s a totally different type of a day. But this is a typical regular weekday. I could also break the ‘kids time’ section into 2 – little and big kids – but let’s keep it simple for now, k?
why it works
What this does is brilliant. It keeps things in their place. It means the laundry doesn’t creep into my consciousness and make me get up from my desk and ‘just quickly’ put a wash on when I should be editing videos – because I know I have a slot later to do laundry.
It means I know that after lunch I should make the packed lunches for tomorrow, so that I’m not stuck doing it with my back to the kids while they eat. It means cupboards actually get tidied and sinks get cleaned, because I have a time of day when I’m going to do home maintenance.
It stops one thing from leaking unhealthily into the time slot for another thing, like work time into lunch time, morning tidy-up into work time, errand time into the school run (TERRIBLE idea!) or dinner prep into the time when we should be eating it (AWFUL plan!).
The real beauty of this is that you can have a recurring daily schedule that supports you through each day WITHOUT having to re-write your schedule daily, but there’s the flexibility within it to change the jobs you do each day. You’re just doing the same kind of jobs at the same times each day.
It’s like you’re sticking those multiple To-Do lists you keep in your head, each in a different block in the schedule.
Aside from those benefits, there are some surprising discoveries I made by writing this out.
surprise benefits
Well, my favourite thing is that I reminded myself that I’m supposed to stop work at 1:30. Too often I stay sitting at my desk until my stomach just won’t let me any more (and 2:45 is really too late to eat lunch, and leaves no time at all for any of the things I need to do before the school run)!
It also makes me realise that I spend a whopping four and a half hours with my kids each night. Those hours are so busy that I sometimes end up feeling I didn’t spend any time with them, but 4.5 HOURS!! That’s longer than I spend working! That just feels good!
Writing down ‘get dressed’ has made me realise that right there is an opportunity for a little self-care first thing in the morning (the options: chuck on the first thing I grab from the wardrobe – OR – spend fifteen seconds longer to choose something nice, with nice earrings, and a little smudge of makeup. Totally do-able.)
And writing down ‘errands’ has made me realise that I actually need to make sure I do errands. I’m so bad at that: The dress in the dry cleaners. That gift for that simcha. My growing pile of toivel-ready kitchen equipment!
As long as I’ve remembered to stick to this, I’ve found it to work a treat. Everything and everyone has their slot. (Even me!) Being a bit of an over-complicator, I’m tempted to create different schedules for different days of the week or times of the year, but for now I’m sticking with this one.
Knowing that I have forgotten it before, I’ve got 2 tricks to try to help me remember to do it:
- Set alarms on my phone to go off at each change of ‘block’.
- Set it as my phone background (at least until it becomes second nature).
I’m sticking with block scheduling for the time being, and it’s already helping me to have peace of mind and to focus on the job in hand. While it’s hard to stop what I’m doing and move on to the next ‘block’, I know that my block schedule is tailor made to what I need to get done in a day, so ignoring it will only result in a messy, unsatisfying day while sticking to it will ensure things get done when they need to. Wish me luck!
P.S. If you’d like to try block scheduling for yourself, it’s easy – but I’ve made it a drop easier for you by sharing my pre-formatted chart.
sara devorah time academy 